Tantra Tips: How to meditate while making love…

I’ve been asked this question three times today, so it must be time to write this tip:

The same keys that can make real tantric hatha yoga, qi gong, and seated meditation so powerful turn ordinary lovemaking into tantric practice…

1. Relax, be still for a moment, and deepen and steady your breath, breathing with your belly (diaphragmic breathing). Be sure to breathe in through your nose…. Relax…

2. Relax more, and steady and relax your eyes. Whether your eyes are open or closed, find a still point where they can rest, focused, but relaxed…

3. Relax, and deepen your breathing some more. Smile, remember for a moment the joy of your very first truly loving embrace, and allow that feeling to fill you again. Relax, let the memory go, keep the joy, and be joyfully aware of yourself with your lover, right now. Relax. Breath and simply be aware, free from thought of “should” or “could”, and merely aware of what is, this moment, now…

4. Make love as you wish, and now steady your mind like you steadied your eyes. Find an internal point of awareness, and settle your mind here, keeping this internal point of tranquility. Don’t ask how, simply let yourself be there. Even as you are aware of your external arousal, your attraction, keep this point of stillness within you, within the dynamic movement of your breath, your writhing bodies, and the electricity of your attraction. (The center of your lower abdomen – the “hara,” or lower dantien – is a safe place to abide…)

5. love and play and play and love again, relaxed, and steady of mind and breath, until you can find balance in movement and stillness, between softness and vigor, between arousal and fullfillment, between stillness and motion…

6. Become aware of that tranquility within your lover as well…

7. ultimately, remain in the relaxed, joyful, internal tranquil abiding, regardless of the tempest of your whirling flesh, and let your mind become clear of conceptual grasping, fantasy, and any attachment to what you think tantra “should be”… simply feel what is… all the pleasure and attraction of material existence, but all of the stillness and tranquility at the heart of it all, it’s innermost nature…

… until you become still within your ecstasy, and come to experience not just the imperfect, incomplete longing for the union of your physical bodies, but the union of bliss and emptiness itself… your own, and that of all sentient beings!